How Switching to Kaseya Improved Efficiency and Security for simpleroute

Brett Johnson spent most of his early career traveling throughout the New England region helping update account software for numerous clients. While most of the locations he visited were run-of-the-mill operations with normal problems, the quality – or lack thereof – of IT services delivered by providers in one particular region shocked him.

What he found in his home state of Vermont was that many local businesses were being given the runaround. “There weren’t a lot of options for IT services locally in Vermont. A lot of the people and businesses I would encounter would have myriad problems as a direct result of the service providers they would outsource their IT to. For instance, one president told me he couldn’t remote into the VPN because he had tickets open for two weeks with his MSP and no one would get back to him. This was a serious issue. Here was a customer who signs the check for the MSP and they weren’t taking their tasks seriously,” said Johnson.

While this caused him great concern, Johnson saw an opportunity where most hadn’t yet. “I recognized that there was a need for trustworthy, reliable IT services because local companies were being told one thing, yet given another. There’s a lot of business process stuff that most MSPs won’t touch. It became apparent to me what needed to happen, so in 2009 I started simpleroute,” explained Johnson.

With the idea of simpleroute now born, the next step was to find the proper RMM/PSA solution set to deliver on the company’s goals of providing these businesses with excellent, transparent IT services. Unfortunately, their first choice didn’t quite fit the bill. Issues such as unreliable patching reports and the need to build custom scripts after systems upgrades led Johnson to re-evaluate the choice he had made.

After a demo and thorough evaluation of VSA by Kaseya, Johnson knew that VSA was the solution that would fulfill the promises simpleroute had made to its clients. “One of the reasons I started the business was to provide folks with the most efficient IT experience. I tried a lot of different products to make what I wanted to do work, and I did not find the right solutions until I started using Kaseya,” declared Johnson.

RMM Reigns Supreme with VSA

All MSPs know that the lifeblood of their business depends on the success of their RMM solution. Prior to moving to VSA, Johnson’s team struggled with custom scripting that had to be rebuilt from scratch with each upgrade to their previous RMM platform in order to prevent reporting issues that could impact customers. On top of that, sluggish connection speeds hampered simpleroute’s ability to service its customers. “As a technician, you spend most of your day in your monitoring tool to connect to systems and work on issues. So the time lost waiting to sign in or for computer windows to load had a great impact on the team’s productivity,” Johnson elucidated.

Thankfully, simpleroute no longer has to worry about system downtime or lost scripts due to the advanced design of VSA. “When you really look at it, VSA is a much more mature product. It was designed to do exactly what it needs to do and performs its tasks excellently. From my standpoint, there was much more thought and research put into ‘how are we going to lay this out’ with VSA,” explained Johnson.

Critical Patching Issues Solved

Inconsistent patching is the first step to becoming a victim of a serious data breach, as many users experienced firsthand during 2017’s worldwide WannaCry ransomware attack. “When WannaCry hit, many organizations realized that their RMM solution was not patching the way they were led to believe. It made people say to themselves ‘Oh I thought we 100 percent compliant, we’re not?’ Fortunately, we moved to Kaseya two weeks prior to the attack because having our clients’ IT environments securely patched, and therefore safeguarded against hackers, was of the utmost importance to our business,” Johnson described.

Today, the patching capabilities of VSA give Johnson and his technicians ease of mind when it comes to completing patch updates. “With VSA we are rock-solid stable. We’ve never had to worry if a Windows agent was out of date, or if we were out of compliance. Patching is one of my favorite aspects of the product,” Johnson said.

The Power of IT Complete and Reporting Made Easy with BMS Integrations

Additionally, Kaseya has helped Johnson and simpleroute deliver more efficient services to its client base through the ease and functionality of BMS by Kaseya. Shortly after its implementation, the team quickly realized the power of Kaseya’s IT Complete platform and the added capabilities BMS brought to the business, especially its reporting. “For us, the switch to BMS put us in a position where we could seamlessly perform tasks within VSA and simultaneously manage the business without interruption. On top of that, we could now leverage BrightGauge business intelligence data to report on metrics like ticket data, KPIs, and system performance all within BMS. Being able to merge that data together within one single pane of glass helps us make better, more informed decisions with our client,” Johnson confirmed. “Long term it’s going to enable us to sit down with our clients and have a real discussion with them on the state of their IT, whereas we could not do that without BrightGauge and BMS in the mix.”

Want to hear more about Brett Johnson and simpleroute’s story? Check out their full Case Study here.

Doug Barney was the founding editor of Redmond Magazine, Redmond Channel Partner, Redmond Developer News and Virtualization Review. Doug also served as Executive Editor of Network World, Editor in Chief of AmigaWorld, and Editor in Chief of Network Computing.